Sports
Long Island is home to numerous famous athletes, including Hall of Famers Jim Brown, Julius Erving, John Mackey, Nick Drahos, and Carl Yastrzemski. Others include Gold Medalists Sarah Hughes and Derrick Adkins, D'Brickashaw Ferguson, Billy Donovan, Larry Brown, Rick Pitino, John McEnroe, Jumbo Elliott, Mick Foley, Zack Ryder, Matt Serra, Boomer Esiason, Vinny Testaverde, Craig Biggio, Frank Catalanotto, Greg Sacks, Rob Burnett, Steve Park, Frank Viola, Chris Weidman, Marques Colston and Speedy Claxton. Several current NHL Players such as Vancouver Canucks Christopher Higgins and Matt Gilroy, Dallas Stars Eric Nystrom, Toronto Maple Leaf Mike Komisarek, and Los Angeles King Rob Scuderi were all born and/or raised on Long Island. Both Komisarek and Higgins played on the same Suffolk County Hockey League team at an early age, and later played on the Montreal Canadiens together. Nick Drahos was an All Scholastic and All Long Island honoree at Lawrence High School, Nassau Co. in 1936 and 1937, and a 2-time Unanimous National College All-American in the years of 1939 and 1940 at Cornell University.
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Ebbets Field, which stood in Brooklyn from 1913 to 1957, was the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team, who decamped to California after the 1957 season to become the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Dodgers won several National League pennants in the 1940s and 1950s, losing several times in the World Series—often called Subway Series—to their Bronx rivals, the New York Yankees. The Dodgers won their lone championship in Brooklyn in the 1955 World Series versus the Yankees. The Barclays Center, a new sports arena, business, and residential complex built partly on a platform over the Atlantic Yards at Atlantic Avenue, will serve as a new home for the Brooklyn Nets basketball team beginning in the 2012-13 NBA season. This move will mark the return to Long Island for the franchise, which played at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum from 1972–1977.
The New York Mets baseball team plays at Citi Field in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens. Their former stadium, Shea Stadium was also home for The New York Jets football team from 1964 until 1983. The new stadium is designed with an exterior facade and main entry rotunda inspired by Ebbets Field. The Brooklyn Cyclones are a minor league baseball team, affiliated with the New York Mets. The Cyclones play at KeySpan Park just off the boardwalk on Coney Island in Brooklyn. Queens also hosts one of the four tennis grand slams, the US Open. Every August (September, in Olympic years) the best tennis players in the world travel to Long Island to play the championships, which is held in the USTA National Tennis Center, located adjacent to Citi Field in Flushing Meadows Park. The complex also contains the biggest tennis stadium in the world, the Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Nassau County is home to the New York Islanders of the National Hockey League. The Islanders have played at Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale since their inception in 1972. The Islanders will move to Barclays Center in Brooklyn in 2015, ensuring that the team will remain on Long Island. The New York Dragons of the Arena Football League also played their home games at Nassau Coliseum.
Long Island has been a hot spot for outdoor lacrosse at the youth and college level, which made way for a Major League Lacrosse team in 2001, the Long Island Lizards. The Lizards play at Mitchel Athletic Complex in Uniondale. The longest dirt Thoroughbred racecourse in the world is located in the Nassau County community of Elmont at Belmont Park. Long Island has also been at the forefront of Semi-Professional football. The Empire State Demon Knights of the Five Star Football League have called Long Island their home since they relinquished the name Kings County Wolfpack and moved to Suffolk County.
Long Island is also home to the Long Island Ducks minor league baseball team of the Atlantic League. Their stadium, Citibank Park, is located in Central Islip. The American Basketball Association's Strong Island Sound play home games at Suffolk County Community College. The two main rugby teams are the Long Island RFC in East Meadow and the Suffolk Bull Moose in Stony Brook. It also has a professional soccer club, the Long Island Rough Riders, who play at Mitchel Athletic Complex in Uniondale. The Rough Riders have won two national championships, in 1995 and 2002. The New York Mets had planned to move their Double-A farm team to Long Island, as part of the ambitious but now-defunct plan for Nassau county called The Lighthouse Project.
Another category of sporting events popular in this region are Firematic Racing events, involving many local Volunteer fire departments.
Long Island also has two horse racing tracks, the Aqueduct Racetrack in Ozone Park, Queens and Belmont Park on the Queens/Nassau border in Elmont, home of the Belmont Stakes.
Read more about this topic: Towns On Long Island, Leisure and Recreation
Famous quotes containing the word sports:
“Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green;
One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain;”
—Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–1774)
“...I didn’t come to this with any particular cachet. I was just a person who grew up in the United States. And when I looked around at the people who were sportscasters, I thought they were just people who grew up in the United States, too. So I thought, Why can’t a woman do it? I just assumed everyone else would think it was a swell idea.”
—Gayle Gardner, U.S. sports reporter. As quoted in Sports Illustrated, p. 85 (June 17, 1991)
“Falling in love is the right adventure for those who dislike sports and travel.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)